Oswald Bayer’s Living by Faith: Justification and Sanctification is very short, 88 pages, but nonetheless quite remarkable. You can see the contents page here.
Oswald Bayer, until recently professor of theology at Tübingen, is as big as Eberhard Jüngel, and his interests are much broader than justification, and much bigger than Miroslav Volf, though in the same area of Church and discipleship. This is magisterial philosophically- and hermenutically-literate theology. You can get some idea of the scale of his thought from his titles – Gott als Auctor (God as Author), Schöpfung als Anrede (Creation as Address), Freiheit als Antwort (Freedom as Answer), Leibliches Wort (Embodied Word: Reformation and Modernity in Conflict). ‘Embodied Word’ – with the sophisticated ontology of Luther’s theology of the Word of God who speaks all things into existence. Bayer’s hermeneutics are theological to a degree not yet reached by the discussion in the UK and States.
It is a scandal that this book is the only piece of the work of this colossal theologian published in English, other than the (not very well translated) articles in Lutheran Quarterly. Read Bayer’s piece on Luther in Blackwell’s The Reformation Theologians (ed. Carter Lindberg) and you will be lifted by its sheer evangelical force and intelligence, its very brevity telling you more about the Reformation as evangelical movement – and merciful act of God – than all the rest of the book.
There are other other scandalously untranslated Germans, chiefly Ingolf Dalferth (Gedeutete Gegenwart: Zur Wahrnehmung Gottes in den Erfahrungen der Zeit – ‘Meaningful Present: The perception of God in the experience of time’) but I’ll tell you about them another day, and anyway, none are as important as Bayer.
